Chapter 2
NICK
It had been a long time since I’d thought about any woman other than Dawn. We’d been together since sixth form, had a bond that we thought nothing would ever break, in the way that teenage sweethearts do.
But in the end, cancer had been the thing to break that bond. It had been stronger than us both. I still couldn’t forgive it.
Sometimes, when I sat in the living room where Dawn died, or the kitchen where I used to cook as she chatted to me about her day, or the bedroom we shared for the eight years we lived together, I tried to conjure her in my mind.
I closed my eyes and pictured her – blonde hair splayed out across the pillow; body curled into me on the two-seater sofa as we watched TV; scarf wrapped round her head when she lost her beautiful curls to the brutal chemotherapy, the dark circles beneath her eyes bruise-blue, her cheeks hollow. Still beautiful. Still positive.
Tonight though, I felt different. I felt as though, for the first time in two and a half years, something inside me had shifted.
And it was all down to Emma.
I couldn’t explain it. From the moment I saw her on the bench in the bandstand, her red hair shining in the golden sunlight, I felt drawn to her. There was something magical about her, otherworldly.
Had she felt that jolt when we shook hands? I was fairly certain I couldn’t have imagined it, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
When we said goodbye I knew I needed to see her again, so I asked her to meet me there next week. It was the first thing I thought of, and it made perfect sense. No pressure. Just a chance to see whether the spark I felt between us was real.
I was so relieved when she agreed, but also knew I’d spend the next few days worrying about whether she’d turn up. I’d be disappointed if she didn’t, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to examine that too closely.
That night I met my brother Andy in the pub. I hadn’t planned to mention it to him – after all, there wasn’t really much to tell him apart from the fact that I’d chatted to a pretty woman for half an hour.
But in the end I didn’t have to say anything, because the first thing he did was ask me why I looked weird.
‘What do you mean, weird?’ I said as we sat down at our usual table with our pints of Guinness.
Our Thursday night pint had been a tradition for as long as we were both legally allowed to drink.
A pint in our local, followed by a curry – chicken korma for me, lamb vindaloo for him.
No one else came, it was always just the two of us.
When Dawn fell ill, she insisted we kept up the tradition, almost pushing me out of the door every Thursday night and reassuring me that she was looking forward to the chance to sleep.
After she died it was the last thing I wanted to do – but Andy knew it was exactly what I needed to stop myself from falling into the abyss of grief.
So there we’d sit, pints in front of us, me staring morosely into the depths of the dark brown liquid, him regaling me with stories of his day.
And slowly, the fog began to lift. Slowly, I began to tell him about my days too.
About the things I’d seen, the things I’d heard.
About my regular trips to the bandstand, Dawn and mine’s special place for so many years.
He shrugged and wiped froth from his upper lip. ‘You look… happy, I think. Well, happier than I’ve seen you since…’ He stopped, not needing to name it.
I spun my pint round on the wooden table. ‘Sidewinder’ by R.E.M. was playing in the background and the sounds of the regular Thursday night drinkers buzzed around us. I tried to form the words in my mind, but Andy got there before me.
‘Shit, it’s not a woman is it? Tell me it is.’
I finally looked up. He was peering at me from over the top of his half-drunk pint, his gaze boring into me like a laser.
‘Sort of.’
He took another mouthful then slammed his glass on the table. ‘Who is she?’
I took a slow sip of my beer, trying to form the words to explain what had happened that afternoon. Andy watched me the whole time, the frown in his forehead deepening the longer he waited.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said. ‘I just got chatting to someone today.’
‘Right. Who? Where?’
I puffed out my cheeks. ‘At the bandstand.’
His eyebrows beetled upwards, his eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything.
‘I went there, as usual,’ I continued. ‘Normally it’s empty, but today there was a woman sitting on the bench.
’ I swallowed. ‘I sat next to her, hoping she’d leave.
You know, let me have my space back. But she looked so sad that I just ended up asking her if she was okay.
’ I looked up at him. ‘Turns out she’d lost someone too.
Someone special. We chatted a bit, you know. About Dawn, and her husband.’
Andy studied me thoughtfully, as though trying to work out what to say. He might have been my twin but I definitely couldn’t read his mind right now.
‘And what did she look like, this woman?’
I thought about her hair, glowing like fire in the sunlight. About her porcelain skin, the firecracker spark between us.
‘She was pretty fit.’ I grinned, and the mood was lightened.
‘Good boy,’ Andy said, holding his hand up for a high five. I smacked mine against it obediently.
‘Seriously though, she was lovely.’
Andy nodded. ‘You know this is the first time you’ve so much as looked at a woman since you lost Dawn?’
‘I know.’ I shrugged. ‘It probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s good to know I’m not dead inside.’
Andy leaned forward, pressed his hand against my forearm. ‘Tell me you at least got her number?’
I shook my head. ‘We’ve arranged to meet again next week.’
‘Where?’
‘Back at the bandstand.’
His eyebrows did their beetling thing again.
I knew why he was so surprised. The bandstand was the place – apart from our home – where I felt closest to Dawn.
Despite the graffiti, and the broken slat in the bench and the peeling paint across the roof, it had been a place that was always special to us.
It was the place where we’d met and the place where I’d proposed.
After her diagnosis – ovarian cancer, which explained why we’d struggled to get pregnant – we went there every week, just sitting on the bench holding hands as the rain hammered down on the rickety old roof, or the sun shone through the gaps in it, or a freezing wind chilled us to the bone.
Even now, I still went there at least once a week, just to sit and think about her, to remember her. Which was why the bandstand being the place where I’d met Emma was such big news to Andy.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It just felt like the right thing to do. I can’t explain it.’
He stood suddenly and I looked up at him. ‘I’m going to get us both another pint and then you’re going to tell me everything. And I want every single detail about the woman who has miraculously brought my little brother back to life.’
I watched as he disappeared towards the bar and tried to work out what I was going to tell him about a woman I still knew next to nothing about.
Hours later, back home alone and full of beer and curry, I lay on the sofa and stared blindly at an old episode of Frasier I’d seen dozens of times.
It had been one of Dawn’s and my favourite shows, and we could recite almost every word of every episode.
Today, Daphne was still oblivious to the fact that Niles was in love with her – an early episode – so I turned the sound down low and let it wash over me.
I felt strange tonight. Out of sorts in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
But I also felt another emotion, one that I couldn’t seem to shake. Guilt.
How could I be thinking about another woman when Dawn had died only two and a half years ago? We’d been together since we were sixteen, had both only ever loved each other. Now, here I was, aged thirty-one a widower of less than three years – and thinking about someone else.
‘You know Dawn would want you to be happy, don’t you?’ Andy had said earlier when I told him over the poppadoms how I felt.
I shrugged. ‘Not this soon though.’
Andy pressed his hand against mine. ‘It’s not that soon, Nicky.’
I’d asked if we could talk about something else after that, and sure enough our chat went back to the usual moaning about work, him telling me what my nieces had been up to, and something funny Mum had said last night.
Now, my mind returned to Emma. She was just a sketch in my head at the moment, a pencil drawing, no details defined or filled in.
And yet I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her.
About her all-encompassing smile, the way it drew you in no matter how much you resisted; about the way she’d looked when she told me about losing someone, the pain in her eyes a reflection of my own.
About the way her gaze burrowed into my soul.
I didn’t know what this meant or whether it would lead anywhere. But I did know that I was glad I’d arranged to see her again.
The weekend dragged by, but by the time Monday arrived I felt energised and giddy in a way I hadn’t for a long, long time. I couldn’t imagine I was ‘over’ losing Dawn, but it felt refreshing not to wake up feeling as though I’d been crushed beneath a heavy blanket of grief.
At five o’clock, however, I started to wonder whether I was simply setting myself up for disappointment. What if Emma didn’t turn up? What if she’d just been humouring me, and hadn’t given me a single thought all weekend?
But then again, why wouldn’t she have just said so?